Michelle Noorali: Helping Users and Developers Consume Open Source

Open source events create the best interaction points between developers and users, and one person you’re likely to meet at these events is Michelle Noorali, one of the most visible and recognizable faces in one of the biggest open source communities: Kubernetes.

Most modern software development, which is by default open source, is done by people spread across the globe, many of whom have never met in person. That’s why events like Open Source Summit are extremely important in creating opportunities for interaction for the people who are managing, developing, and using these open source projects.

Noorali, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, says she loves meeting people at events and learning about how they are using cloud-native tools and what they need. “I am trying to see if those tools that I work on can also meet other people’s needs,” she said.

This direct interaction gives Noorali a unique perspective for understanding the pain points. For example, “It’s really hard to pick from all of the cloud native technologies and figure out how they work together because at the end of the day, you are trying to deploy and run applications in the cloud or on bare metal,” she said. “The second point is how do I expose my developers, my teams to this stuff and get them to actually use cloud native tools, without having to learn about everything from scratch.”